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Both find a repose in a divine perfection, which, whether in a

more personal or impersonal form, exists without them and

independently of them, as well as within them.

There is no mention of the idea of good in the Timaeus, nor of

the divine Creator of the world in the Republic; and we are

naturally led to ask in what relation they stand to one another.

Is God above or below the idea of good? Or is the Idea of Good

another mode of conceiving God? The latter appears to be the

truer answer. To the Greek philosopher the perfection and unity

of God was a far higher conception than his personality, which he

hardly found a word to express, and which to him would have

seemed to be borrowed from mythology. To the Christian, on the

other hand, or to the modern thinker in general, it is difficult,

if not impossible, to attach reality to what he terms mere

abstraction; while to Plato this very abstraction is the truest

and most real of all things. Hence, from a difference in forms of

thought, Plato appears to be resting on a creation of his own

mind only.